Certain Prey

by John Sandford

  'Good,' Sherrill said.

  Chapter Seven

  When Carmel got back to her apartment, Rinker was lying on the couch, a pillow behind her head, reading the NBC Handbook of Pronunciation. 'Did you know that the French nudie bar is called the foh-LEE-bair-ZHAIR?'

  Carmel shrugged: 'Yeah, I guess.'

  'See, that's what people get when they study French,' Rinker said, tossing the book on an end table. 'They learn how to pronounce neat stuff. I had to take Spanish for my BA, but there's nothing neat in the pronunciation. Like in French - I always thought it was foh-LEE beer-zhair-AY.

  'I don't know, I took Spanish, too,' Carmel said.

  Rinker sat up, dropped her feet to the floor and asked, 'What happened with the cops?'

  'They asked Hale about Rolo. They found his body this morning - some junkie dropped by, looking for coke.'

  'Did you tell them that you'd represented Rolo?' Rinker asked.

  For a split second, a lie hovered on Carmel's tongue. She rejected it and said, 'Yeah, I pretty much had to. They would've found out.'

  'All right. So now they can tie you to Rolo, but they can't tie you to the crime, because nobody knows that you're... involved with Hale. Not even Hale knows it. Have I got that right?'

  'That's right.' She wandered to a window and looked out over the city; it was a hot day, and a thin haze hung over the Midway area to the east. 'If it weren't for that fuckin' tape, we'd be in the clear. I'm thinking maybe we should have strangled Rolo, instead of shooting him - then then there wouldn't be any tie. That was a mistake.'

  'Didn't think of it,' Rinker said. 'The gun was just the natural thing to do, since we had it right there.'

  'Yeah, well, they're waiting for an analysis of the slugs. They can tell whether the bullets that killed Barbara Allen and the ones that killed Rolo came from the same batch of lead.'

  'All right... gonna have to get rid of the guns pretty soon. Or buy a new batch of shells.'

  'Did you come up with any ideas about the tape?' Carmel asked.

  'Yes, I have,' Rinker said. She stood up, walked to a corner table, and picked up Rolo's address book. 'For one thing, do you remember when he said he gave the tape to somebody named Mary?'

  'Yeah - but there aren't any names in the book, only...'

  'Initials,' Rinker said. 'But I had a little time, so I started going through it. There are four sets of initials starting with M. So I walked down to your library,

  and looked in the cross-reference directories... and then I found out he was using a stupid little code on his phone numbers. He put the last number at the beginning. Like he'd have a number, say, that was 123 dash 4567 and he'd write it down as 712 dash 3456.'

  Carmel was impressed. 'How'd you figure that out?'

  'Because some of the prefixes didn't exist, and the ones that did were all over the place. One was for a dog-grooming service. I mean, why would he even bother to write it in his book? So anyway, the assholes I used to work for did some jail time, and they told me how guys would use these simple codes. So I juggled numbers until I found one that gave me all good prefixes. And then, everything else worked out -all the codes were residential, and two of the names that began with M were women. Or probably women. One was Martha Koch, but the other was just initial M - M. Blanca. Where's there's just an initial, it usually means a woman living alone.Younger woman.'

  'Mary?

  'No, it's something else - I called, and a woman answered, and I asked for Mary Blanca and she said I had the wrong number. She had a little accent, maybe Mex. But I was thinking about how scared Rolo was, and how he came up with the name Mary. I bet when you asked him for the name, and you said, Quick, I bet her name popped into his head, and it almost got out, but he switched at the last minute. Could be Martha, or it could be this other M.'

  Carmel was skeptical: "That's a long chain of could-be's,' she said. 'It could be some other M, or not an M at all.'

  'Yeah, but we don't have anything else.'

  'Rolo's name's gonna be in the paper tomorrow,' Carmel said. 'If this M doesn't know he's dead, she will tomorrow morning. Then she's gonna look at the tape, if she hasn't already. Then she's gonna give it to the cops.'

  'So let's go talk to M. Blanco. And Martha Koch.'

  'After dark.'

  'Yup.'

  'We're hanging by a goddamn thread,' Carmel said.

  Martha Koch's life was saved by a baby shower; she never knew it.

  'Lotta cars around,' Carmel muttered as she and Rinker started up the Kochs' driveway; a dozen cars were parked along the street. The house was a neat, modest, tuck-under ranch across the street from a golf course. A curving line of flagstone steps led across a rising lawn to the front door. The porch light was on, and the living-room curtains were open. At the top of the steps, Carmen said, 'Uh-oh,' and stopped. Two women were hopping around the front room, laughing, and one of them was looking back and obviously talking to yet a third one, or more.

  'Forget it,' Rinker said. 'We'll have to come back.' They retreated down the steps, walked up the street to Carmel's Volvo, and left.

  M. Blanca's house was a long step down in affluence, one of a row of old asbestos-shingled houses just north of a University of Minnesota neighborhood called Dinkytown. Four mailboxes hung next to a single door.

  'It's an apartment,' Rinker said, her voice low.

  'Lot of them are,' Carmel said.

  'We gotta take care - there'll be other people around. You got the money?'

  'Yeah.' A few more steps and Carmel asked, 'What do I look like?' Rinker was wearing her red wig; they'd both wrapped dark silk scarves around their heads.

  'You look like one of those religious ladies who always wear scarves,' Rinker said.

  'All right,' Carmel said. She added, 'So do you.'

  At the front door, Carmel pointed a pocket flash it at the mailboxes. The box on the left said Howell; the next one showed a strip of paper, which had been peeled off. The third said in pink ink, Jan and Howard Davis, with a green ink addition, in a child's hand, And Heather. The fourth said Apartment A. She opened the left one, Howell, and found it empty. The box with the strip of paper contained a phone bill addressed to David Pence, Apartment C. She skipped the Davis box, and checked the box on the far right. Empty.

  'I think, but I'm not sure, that we want apartment A,' she whispered to Rinker. Rinker nodded and they pushed through the outer door into a short hallway. Stairs led away to the right, and a high-tech Schwinn

  bicycle was chained to the banister. 'Not like my old Schwinn,' Rinker muttered.

  Down the hall, on the left wall, was a pale yellow door. Another door, this one a pale Paris green, was at the end of the hall. The first door had a large metal B on it; the Paris-green door had an A. Rinker put her hand in her pocket, where the gun was, and Carmel stepped forward and knocked on the door.

  The knock was answered by deep silence; Carmel knocked again, louder. This time, there was an answering thump, like somebody getting up, off a couch or a bed. A moment later, the door opened a crack, and a sleepy Latino man peered out through the crack and said, 'What?'

  'We need to talk to Ms. Blanca,' Carmel said quietly.

  'She's sleeping,' he said, and the crack narrowed.

  'We've got some money for her,' Carmel said quickly. The crack stopped narrowing, and the man's eyes were back at the crack. He didn't argue. He simply said, 'I'll take it.'

  'No. Rolo said we were only to give it to Ms. Blanca, if anything happened to him.'

  'Oh.' He thought it over for a minute, as if this somehow made sense; and Carmel's heart did a quick extra beat. 'What happened to Rolo?'

  'Quite a bit of money,' Carmel said. She wanted to sound nervous, and she did.

  'Just a minute,' the Latino man said. The door closed and they heard him call, 'Hey, Marta.'

  'Marta Blanca,' Rinker muttered. 'She bakes right.'

  'What?' Carmel looked at Rinker as though Rinker were slipping away.

  '
Better biscuits, cakes and pies with Marta Blanca...'

  Carmel shook her head, bewildered, then the man was back, and the door opened. He looked them over for a second, made a judgment, and said, 'Yeah. Come in.'

  Carmel led the way into the apartment, which seemed to be decorated in brown; one lamp with a nicotine-yellow shade was turned on, the shade at a tipsy angle over a stack of Hustler magazines. The odor of marijuana hung around the curtains.

  'How much money?' the man asked.

  'We need to ask...' Carmel started, but then a woman came through the kitchen, apparently from a bedroom in the back. She was tucking her blouse into the back of her jeans. 'Are you Marta?'

  'Yeah.' The woman still looked sleepy. 'What happened to Rolando?'

  'He's dead,' Carmel said flatly. 'Somebody shot him.'

  The woman stopped in her tracks, the blood draining from her face: 'Dead? He can't be dead. I just talked to him yesterday.'

  'The cops found him this morning,' Rinker said, stepping out of Carmel's shadow. 'Was he a good friend?'

  'He was he was he was...' she said, shakily.

  'Her brother,' the man finished. Rinker flicked a look at Carmel, who nodded almost imperceptibly. Her hand moved in her pocket.

  'Half-brother,' the woman said. She dropped on a chair. 'Ah, Jesus,' she said.

  'It was on TV,' Rinker said.

  'He said he gave you a tape to hold, and that if anything happened to him, we were supposed to come and get it, because if you keep it, somebody's gonna show up here and hurt you,' Carmel said, squatting to look the woman straight in the face. 'He gave us an envelope to give you. Money.'

  The man said, 'We don't got no tape,' but the woman said, reflexively, 'How much?'

  They had the tape, Carmel thought, and she felt a wire, tight in her spine, suddenly relax.

  'Five thousand dollars,' Carmel said, speaking to the woman. The woman looked up at the man, who said, 'I dunno.'

  Carmel took the envelope out of her pocket. 'If we could get the tape?'

  The woman stood up, but the man put a hand out to her. 'I think we should look at the tape first,' he said.

  'Rolando said not to,' the woman said, nervously dry-washing her hands.

  "We need to get that tape...'

  The woman flipped her hands up, explaining to Carmel, 'It's one of those funny little tapes, you need to get a special holder-thing to run it...'

  'We're gonna look at the tape,' the man said, decisively. 'If you show up here to give us five thousand...' He smiled brightly and said, 'Then, I bet it's worth a lot more.'

  'We really need the tape. Rolando wasn't supposed to get it, and the people it belongs to, you really don't want to mess with,' Rinker said. Her voice was flat, and sounded dangerous to Carmel's ear. The vibration apparently went past the Latino.

  He sneered at her. 'What, the fuckin' Mafia? Or the Colombianos? Fuck those people.' He turned to the woman. 'We look at the tape.' And back to Carmel and Rinker, hitching up his pants. 'You bitches can leave the envelope here. If it's enough, we'll give you the tape. If not, we'll figure out a price.'

  'Goddamnit, this isn't necessary,' Carmel said, stepping in front of Rinker. Out at the very edge of her vision she could see Rinker's gun hand sliding out of her pocket.

  'Yeah, it's fuckin' necessary,' the Latino man said, his voice rising. 'What I fuckin' say is necessary, that's what's fuckin' necessary, right?' He looked at Marta. 'Is that right?'

  She looked away and Carmel shrugged. 'If you say so.' She took another sideways step, and felt Rinker's arm come up with the gun.

  The man stepped back, a little surprised, but still smiling slightly. 'What, that's supposed to scare me?'

  That was the last thing he said: Rinker shot him in the center of the forehead, and he dropped in his

  tracks. The woman, Marta, clapped both hands to her face in disbelief, and before she could scream or make any other sound, Rinker panned the gun barrel across to her face and snapped: 'If you scream, I'll kill you.'

  'Give us the tape, you get the money,' Carmel said.

  'Oh my god oh my god oh my god...'

  'The fuckin' tape,' Rinker snarled. The woman put a hand out toward the muzzle, as though she could fend off bullets, and slowly backed away, still looking down at the man.

  The tape was in the kitchen, in a cupboard, inside a Dutch oven. She handed it to Rinker, who handed it to Carmel, who looked at it and nodded. 'You didn't make any copies?'

  'No, no, no, no...'The woman was staring fixedly at Rinker now. Then the man in the frontroom groaned and Rinker turned and walked toward him.

  'He's alive?' Marta Blanca asked. Rinker said, 'Yeah, it happens. Sometimes the bullet doesn't even make it through the skull bone.' She casually leaned forward, bringing the muzzle to within an inch or two of the man's head, and fired three quick shots into his skull. His feet bounced once, and he laid still.

  Marta crossed herself, her eyes now fixed on Rinker. 'You're going to kill me, aren't you?' she said, with the sound of certainty in her voice.

  'No, I'm not,' Rinker said. She showed a tiny smile.

  Carmel, who had been carrying the second gun, shot Marta Blanca in the back of the head. As she

  fell, Carmel stepped forward and fired five more times. Then she smiled at Rinker, her eyes bright with excitement, and said, 'We got the goddamn tape. We got the goddamn tape.'

  Rinker put the gun back in her jacket pocket and said, 'Let's get a drink somewhere.'

  'Let's check the tape to make sure it's right, erase it, and then get a drink somewhere,' Carmel said.

  Going out into the hall, they closed the door behind themselves; they took three steps and suddenly a shaft of light fell across their faces. They both looked right, standing in the hall, and then down. A small girl stood there, looking up at them. Their faces were illuminated by the light from the interior. Then behind the girl, a crabby mommy called, 'Heather! Shut that door!'

  Carmel was fumbling at the pistol in her pocket, but then another door opened above them, and a male voice said a few unintelligible words; they both looked up, and the little girl closed the door.

  'Gotta go,' Rinker said urgently.

  'She saw us,' Carmel said.

  But there were footsteps on the landing above and Rinker thrust Carmel toward the door. She went, hurrying, Rinker a step behind, out the door, down the sidewalk, the apartment door closing behind them.

  'She was just a kid,' Rinker said. 'She won't remember. They might not find the bodies for a week.'

  'Why can't this be easy?' Carmel asked. They hurried down the dark side walk toward the lights of Dinkytown, and she added, 'This is just like a dream I had when I was a teenager. A school dream, where I couldn't find my locker and the bell was about to ring, and every time I was about to find it, something else happened to keep me away from it...'

  'Everybody has that dream,' Rinker said. 'We're in the clear.'

  'Maybe,' Carmel said. She turned to look back; the dark figure of a man was climbing on a bike, and then headed away from them, out on the street. 'But I am on the inside; if anything comes out of that kid, we're gonna have to go back and clean up.'

  'Let's get that drink,' Rinker said.

  They had several drinks, and two midnight steaks, at Carmel's apartment. Carmel had a rarely used grill on her balcony, and Rinker did the honors, moving the meat and sauce like a professional. 'I once worked in a bar where we had an outdoor grill. Place was full of cowboys, wanted their steaks burned,' she told Carmel.

  'Make mine not-quite-rare,' Carmel said. 'No blood.' Carmel was in the media room, looking at the tape: the whole episode with Rolo was on the tape, while the other tapes had only the final sequence. 'So this is the original,' she told Rinker with satisfaction. 'Even if there's a copy someplace, they could get me into court, but I'd prove it was a

  copy and could have been altered and I'd be gone.'

  'Still be best if there weren't any copies,' Rinker said.


  'You about done out there?'

  'All done. Dinner is served.'

  'Good. One more thing before we eat.' Carmel stripped the tape out of the cassette by hand, tossed the cassette pack into a waste basket, squeezed the jumbled tangle of tape into a wad the size of a softball, and dropped it onto the hot charcoal in the grill.

  'That won't be coming back,' she said as she watched it burn.

  'Three people dead because of that tape,' Rinker said, shaking her head.

  'Ah, they were nothing, a bunch of druggies,' Carmel said. 'Nobody'll miss them.'